Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

I was talking about Vietnam one day. He was the right age. My son was there, one tour. But Alvin said, “I didn’t join up.”

“Why not?”

“Couldn’t.”

“Nothing wrong with you,” I nagged him a bit.

“Warner, I was in prison,” Alvin said after a while. First time he ever used my name, but all this time he never looked me in the eye.

“How long for?”

“Bunch of years.”

“‘Bunch of years’! So what’d you go and do?”

“I killed my wife.”

“She probably deserved it,” I said.

I knew I was right, because he didn’t say anything else, though he left me a month later. Damn, I never found a better stern man.

Everyone has always liked us. “Here come Mort and Irma.” They’d see us holding hands. We are small of stature — Irma’s barely five feet — like a couple of kids. We had no kids ourselves, so we never had to grow up. We considered ourselves good mixers and had lots of friends. But we went kaput, and here’s how.

As I’m in restaurant supplies, I travel quite a bit, and it’s no fun, those cheap hotels you have to stay in to keep the profit margin up and the overhead down. Many of my accounts are in Florida, so we relocated to West Palm. But Florida is a huge state, and I still had to deal with the hotels and lots of nights away.

Irma got a little blue on her own and talked of buying a dog, and she didn’t even like dogs. One Friday I returned home from the road, assuming we were going out to dinner, as we usually did. But:

“Can’t. I’ve got my group,” Irma said.

Just like that, a women’s group. She had joined it while I was away; some neighbor introduced her. It made her happy. Good. My turn to stay home alone.

The next week, same thing but a little worse. I say, “Hon, how about a juicy steak instead of the group.”

“I’m a vegan.” Just like that. “We decided.”

They had all turned vegetarian, the group. It was wives of working guys and some divorcées, kind of a support group. I told her I’m all for it, and I am. Traveling and sales is no picnic, but if this made her happier while I was away, hey, great. Then the name issue came up.

“Irma,” I says one Friday, and she stops me, makes a face.

“Don’t call me that. I’m Cheyenne.”

“And I’m Tonto.”

I had to sleep on the couch. This was no damn joke. And that wasn’t the end of it. How could I be so insensitive? She was Cheyenne. They were all something. She had new stationery printed. She says she can take or leave the holidays. Imagine that. I’m still traveling, but when I come home these days, I don’t know this woman.

I had been married for twenty-two years, living on the windward side of Oahu in Hawaii. No children. Originally I had come to Hawaii, as a young salesman, to advise people on how to set up Jiffy Lube franchises, but when my consultancy work was done, I decided to stay. I got myself a franchise, realized this was where I wanted to live, and sent for Diana, my high school sweetheart. She had a lot of complaints about living in Hawaii — the rats, the cockroaches, the way people talked English like it was another language, the lousy food, the terrible traffic, and many more, which is maybe the point of this story.

I was happy. I would have done anything to make Diana happy. I hardly noticed her criticisms of me, although our whole being in Hawaii was my doing, as she said. I was in kind of a daze, but so what? I never got rock fever, like they say. I was rock happy.

We were driving one wet afternoon over the Pali, and just beyond the tunnel there was one of these speed traps. Cop flags me down. I drive onto the shoulder and get out my license and registration.

The cop was a big moke, six-something, way over two hundred pounds, hands like pieces of meat. But he was very polite, very professional. It was true, I had probably been speeding. I laughed and agreed with him while he wrote out the citation.

A horrible choking honk like an animal’s sudden fury made him stop writing. But it was a familiar sound to me.

“Billy! You tell him we’re going to court! You hear me, Billy!”

The cop took a step back and looked into the car, at Diana’s pudgy purple face, the veins standing out on her neck, the spit on her lips.

“Is that your wife?” He said it in a disgusted and pitying voice.

I said yes, and I almost added, What’s the problem?

He tore up the ticket. “I ain’t giving you this. You got enough problems, bruddah.”

After a few months we separated, and within a year were divorced. Diana’s back on the mainland now.

It was at the three-day wedding event for my eldest daughter, who was marrying a very nice man, Brian, a successful contractor in Oregon. Taylor said, “I want a huge bash. You only get married once.” I kept my big mouth shut.

The bash was held at a resort in Hawaii and involved all the guests being shuttled to lunches, rehearsals, dinners, activities, and so forth, getting in and out of vans and minibuses, and doing lots of socializing. We were sent a three-page itinerary. Movable feast!

I went with Tim, my second husband. On the first afternoon there was an important cocktail party at a function room on the property. The van was parked where it should have been, near the porte-cochère, but there was no sign of the bus driver. I walked up and down looking for him.

A gruff-looking man approached the van and waited at the front passenger door.

I was annoyed that he was late and not even apologetic. I said, “Are you the bus driver?”

He said, “No,” and a second later seemed to change his mind about getting aboard. This really annoyed me, because I was sure he was the bus driver, and I muttered something, which I wish I could remember now. He walked away. I waited awhile, and then it hit me.

That man, the gruff stranger I had spoken to, was my ex-husband, Taylor’s father, to whom I had been happily married for sixteen years, until he went off with a much younger woman, who I heard had dumped him, couldn’t stand his drinking. I looked back and did not see him. Later, we said hello but not much else. We never discussed my gaffe, which I think says a lot.

I was unhappily married and living in Connecticut, your typical bored housewife. Then I took a course: radiology. X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs. Two years. I got my diploma and left my husband and came here to Maine. There’s a lot of work in radiology, and the hours aren’t too bad. I chose Maine because of the winters.

I spend the whole winter skiing, except last winter, when I had some medical procedures. I have five screws in my shoulder and a permanently damaged rotator cuff that screams in damp weather. I’ve broken both arms, my collarbone, and my left ankle. I need to have my knees replaced. That’ll be fun. Basically, they make lateral incisions, sever your legs, put in metal, and give you some kind of ID so you can go through a metal detector in an airport.

The ankle was something else. I read my own CAT scan and opted for ankle replacement. Basically, they got me an ankle from a cadaver, and they removed my bad ankle and fitted me with this donor ankle. But it’s too small. I’m getting pain. They might have to redo it.

I hate cross-country skiing. My ex was huge on it. I hated hearing him say, “Oh, look at that yellow spruce,” or “Oh, look, a rose-breasted grosbeak,” or “Oh, gosh, let’s sit on that log and have a bagel.” Cross-country is for, I want to say, fairies.

He didn’t understand that pain is pleasure, if properly applied. What I want is black runs, all-day black runs. I want to ski straight down on black runs with my legs banging and the tears streaming out of my eyes and freezing on my face. And snot pouring out of my nose and streaking on my cheek, and my whole face burning from the cold. I am hardly able to breathe on a black run, which no man I have ever known can understand, which is also why I fired my husband, I’ve fired every boyfriend I’ve ever had, and basically it’s just me and my dog.